My Thoughts

Eyeglasses Online

ertyu — 2010-07-06T13:28:32-05:00

I haven't considered shopping online for glasses until just recently. So far I felt it was worth it to pay any mark up and be able to shop in person and ensure I was getting the absolute best since I wear glasses all day every day. But a couple things changed my mind recently. When I went shopping for glasses at the doctors office, they didn't really have that great a selection and they weren't really all the interested in selling me some. Since I didn't really find anything I wanted and nothing else was forth coming there, I decided to leave without buying anything. When I got home, it started to occur to me that I could actually shop online. But this was only because of a few circumstances that hadn't been true before. While browsing for frames the ones I ended up picking were nearly identical in shape and size to what I was currently wearing and when I got home, I searched through my old frames to find my last pair were also nearly identical as well. Furthermore most of my previous frames were of the same size. That narrowed it right now, it would be easy to find frames of the same shape and size online instead of having to try them on in person. And secondly I now had an up to date prescription in hand. So I browsed a few places online and could generally find a suitable frame at each one. From past experience I know that my prescription and lens requirements won't work with the advertised prices on most sites but still I found the prices to be vastly cheaper. To the point where I would save hundreds of dollars.

I looked around a few of the bigger sites online and there were lots of comparable options. I had it narrowed down to just a handful based on who had the best prices for the top end lenses I need/want, namely Zenni Optical, 39DollarGlasses.com and EyeBuyDirect.com. I ended up settling on clearlycontacts.ca. They are the only one really setup especially for Canada, and offer a 100% refund on returns. The coupon code I found at RFD for 20% off pushed their prices in line with the others from the US. The only gotcha I found so far with is the handling and insurance fee tacked on at the very end...not quite free shipping after all. Some interesting things I noticed while shopping, almost every place I looked at a fairly limited set of frame options although I was able to find a couple I liked at each place, but none of them really had any of the same frames. The prices for everything from frames to lenses to coatings varied quite dramatically between the different vendors. Several places have a virtual try on feature where you can upload a picture and overlay the frames on top of it, which can be quite handy. Picking out frames still proved to be quite challenging even with the very limited parameters I was using. Even when looking very closely at all the pictures and options for viewing the frames, subtle differences were easy to miss sometimes. But in the end I got something I'm quite satisfied with for around $400 less than the alternative. I'm looking to try another location to buy some prescription sunglasses as well.

Mirrored

ertyu — 2010-05-16T10:31:46-05:00

I think I've aimed my side mirrors in the "traditional" sense since I got my driver's license. That is, they point so you can just see the side of the car. Although over time I've pushed them out a little bit more. But recently I decided I would try the other method of setting my mirrors so the sides cover the blind spots and there is continuous coverage through all three mirrors.

At first it was a bit tricky as I constantly caught sight of cars in my peripheral vision and it was disconcerting, but now I've adapted and have found there are both advantages and disadvantages. First off, it is a great help in displaying the blind spots and making lane changing easier. I think thats the only advantage though. For me I've found a couple disadvantages. My car came with tint on the 3 rear windows so I've come to rely on the side mirrors to help with visibility while backing up, especially at night. In dark conditions that blind spot behind me just got a whole lot bigger. The other disadvantage I've noticed is that I can no longer look behind and beside me. This is useful when merging, changing from a slower to faster lane or monitoring turn signals of cars behind.

I'm not sure which alignment I'll end up sticking with, for now it's easier to leave them set as is. Ideally there is a case for both positions. I know there are some cars which will move mirrors between two positions depending on the circumstance. For example, when equipped a certain way, my car can be had with a feature that tips the mirrors in and down when in reverse. I would guess at some point someone has come up with a feature to flip the mirrors out when you put on a turn signal while in motion. The blind spot monitoring systems might also be an idea, although the one car I tried with it, never seemed to work.

Banking Fun

ertyu — 2010-05-06T19:17:06-05:00

At the end of March I received notice of changes to service fees that applied to my bank account. At first it didn't look too bad, a transaction that incurred a $5 fee would now be free, similarly with a transaction that cost $1. But the fee changes tip from favourable to unfavourable as you progress further into the document. It seems it was ordered that way on purpose. As I digested the information it became clear that transactions I never undertake were the ones being reduced and the ones I encounter regularly month after month were increasing. On the back of a $1.5B quarterly profit at the bank I was a bit upset that they felt the need to increase fees to recover "increased costs". It was only a couple bucks a month, but I hate being charged for something like that when the bank is already making profit off me. So now I was on a quest to rid myself of these new charges.

Weak Validation

ertyu — 2010-05-01T14:29:00-05:00

I recently bumped into a wonderfully weak validation system again that reminded me of all the trouble it causes. It's a system that tries to identify you by asking questions only you should know. The questions however are only based on data that can be obtained in your credit report. It becomes a random set of 5 questions generated by their system in specific ways. The questions are presented as a multiple choice with 5 answers each I believe. They usually do a good job of creating incorrect answers that fit the same pattern as the correct answer and will add in a 'None of the above' sometimes as well, as both a correct and incorrect answer. I have noticed questions where there is obviously only one correct answer though. The first trouble is that even with a fairly good set of answer creation algorithms, it is not that difficult to guess correctly, especially if someone knows anything about you. The next trouble spot is the data the questions are based on. Generally the data in your credit report is put there by someone else and usually you don't look at it at all or very infrequently. From what I've seen the data often has errors in it. In addition, the organization name that may get inserted into the report may not match up with the trade name a consumer deals with. You might have noticed this on a credit card statement also. This is probably why the questions have been formatted as multiple choice. Finally, the questions also deal with the order of entries on the credit report. As I've noticed these are fairly random and unpredictable. A consumer would have a hard time answering these questions correctly without having the exact same credit report the questions are based on in front of them.

In my most recent experience I believe I answered 2 out of the 5 questions wrong as I either didn't know the correct answer or the correct answer was not present in the list (at least from my view, not my credit report view). My application was stopped at that point. So that brings me to the next flaw. I simply hit the back button in my web browser and up pops a new set of 5 questions, this time I can correctly answer or at least correctly guess for all of them and my application completes successfully.

Caching by the Numbers

ertyu — 2010-04-20T13:51:17-05:00

This summer will mark the 7th anniversary of my start in geocaching and I thought it was time to put my thoughts to paper again, as much has changed over the years as the sport has evolved.

In the early days of my geocaching adventures and mostly the early days of geocaching itself, it was an occasional hobby. If I were looking for something to do, it would be one of the items on the list. I would go to the website of geocaching.com and look through the listings for a cache I was interested in finding that day. Yes, it was just the one cache usually. I would find the listing, review it, download the co-ordinates and print out any information I would require. Then I would drive over and head out for the find. Often the search took a while, sometimes it was tricky to find and sometimes there were just too many people around to search without being seen. But after I found the cache I felt rewarded. I would sit there with the open container and peruse the items and probably trade something. Put my note in the log book and pack everything back up and re-hide the cache. With the cache found, my experience was done for the day and I would head off.

Internet TV

ertyu — 2010-04-10T10:26:00-05:00

I've been avoiding watching TV shows online mainly because I assumed it would be a horrible experience and what I've read didn't dispel that. I figured I should give it a try as it seems like that is the way things are moving and there were shows I don't get or my TiVo missed. I started with watching a show on discovery.ca. Navigation was poor, quality was poor. The shows are laced with commercial breaks like normal, you can't skip or fast forward through them. The worst thing is that when the commercials pop up, the show drops out of the full screen mode I was using and can't be put back, what a pointless jarring change - 'hey I'm a commercial you can stop paying attention now'. In addition, every commercial was the same through the entire show. I also watched some video at cbc.ca, as compared to discovery, pretty much everything is a little better. Navigation is a little cleaner and faster, quality a little better. Commercials are still present but I think there are fewer and they are much better integrated. On the whole a better experience. But all in all, watching content recorded straight off live TV is a much better experience still.

Hard Drive Lifespan

ertyu — 2010-04-09T22:52:05-05:00

I used to think, perhaps naively, that hard drives would generally run fault free forever unless there was a defect or detrimental event. Failure after failure didn't seem to change my opinion, there always seemed to be something I could point to that caused the error. Whether or not that was true, I've switched my opinion and now consider the drives to have a lifespan. Much like a floppy disk of old that you expected to slowly die and eventually become unreadable, I expect my disks to slowly die with every minute they spin. As I'm writing, I know 4 of my disks in use are exhibiting signs of failure. A disk in my desktop computer is throw soft SMART errors, data seems fine so far, a second disk is throwing hard SMART errors and I've noticed corruption. A disk I've swapped out of my TiVo is showing signs of read errors, but is currently still able to hide them and won't throw any error conditions. My classic iPod is also showing signs of read errors, excessive head movement, stalls and skips and odd errors when trying to write to it.

The Missing Footnote

ertyu — 2010-04-01T15:54:37-05:00

You often see little footnote markers on text, like numerals or symbols, eg '1' or '*', which usually lead to a footnote at the bottom of the page that has all the fine print and/or disclaimers that really tell you whats going on. Lately I've noticed many of these indicators, but no corresponding footnote and along with it the important details are omitted. What gives?

The Vegas Trip

ertyu — 2010-03-25T10:45:59-05:00

In late February I joined OHMIC on a weekend trip to Vegas.

The cheapest flights turned out to be on Allegiant Air, flying out of Grand Forks to Phoenix. We left early Friday afternoon for Grand Forks, picked up the two remaining caches in Grand Forks, coincidently one in North Dakota and one in Minnesota, grabbed a quick snack and made it to the airport with mere minutes to spare. The packed waiting room was another indication of the affect Allegiant has had on the small Grand Forks airport, there isn't enough room for a single plane's worth of passengers there. Allegiant is a discount carrier and the planes reflected that, older MD82/83 models with quite the uncomfortable seats, not to mention the upgrade charges for everything.

We landed in Phoenix at Phoenix-Mesa airport, a small older military airport I think, Allegiant is the only commercial carrier to fly there, another example of how they keep the costs low. We walked right off the plane onto the tarmac and then to a terminal building, then back outside and then another terminal building, picked up our rental car with no fanfare and were off for Vegas. No sooner were we on the road than 2 coyotes crossed our path. We found a few caches in central Phoenix along our route out of the city. Near the edge of town a bored police officer stopped us at one parking lot cache for quite some time. After all the time and lectures about caching in areas like this, he ended up putting the cache back after we left. We drove for most of the rest of the night and found very few caches. We did come upon one odd sight. A highway construction sign was put out with the message "Caution: Runners". I wasn't sure what it meant, but a short while later we saw a line of bouncing lights down the side of the highway. As we approached it was a series of runners all with headlamps and reflective vests. Mile after mile we continued to pass these people running in the middle of the night down the side of the highway. We eventually stopped at a rest stop in a town and asked the people manning it about what was going on. Apparently it was a 120mile relay marathon that had started at 10am that morning and continued non-stop until finished. Sometime early that morning we arrived in Kingman, AZ and stopped for a few hours sleep.

The next day we were back on the road to Vegas, stopping at a few caches. The smell of sulphur permeated the air in the desert. We also discovered that many of the caches along the road were really off the road and required an off road vehicle to just randomly drive through the desert in most places. We stopped at a little old town, Chloride, AZ thats been setup as a bit of a ghost town. It was pretty darn empty except for the bull roaming freely around town, an interesting place to stop and stretch the legs and look around though. Along the way I don't remember any rest stops or really any places to pull over much. Next we got to drive over the Hoover Dam. Another interesting spot to stop and see in person. The water levels were quite low. Perhaps almost more impressive was the new bridge they are building high above the area that will allow people to bypass the winding route over the dam. Apparently construction has been slow going, the once proud sign indicating the construction work is faded to nearly an unreadable state and the completion date has long past, even the spray painted year appended has past. Later we found out that a major structural member of the bridge failed and had to be dismantled and replaced. We stopped at Boulder City, NV a small town just half way between the border and Vegas for a few caches included a very old one. It's interesting to see how caching has changed over the years.

Bridge
- Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam

Next stop Las Vegas. We arrived and tried to arrange a meeting with our friend MHz who also was in town. By now it was drizzling a little out. MHz was off on another adventure so we decided we would start by heading to California. Just around and over the border we found a few caches and added another state to our caching map. As it turns out, just a few days later a 'Power Trail' would be published right in this area that amassed over 600 caches in a straight line along a path, each just a few hundred meters apart. On the way out to California every cache we looked at seemed to be off in the desert with no road or access. On the way back we decided to take an older road next to the interstate and were able to find quite a few nice large and quick caches in the desert, we still couldn't figure out how to access those other caches we looked at unfortunately. Back in Vegas now, we had heard from MHz and were told it was a NASCAR weekend, which would make traffic on I-15 to Utah pretty nasty.

Figuring it was Saturday, drizzling and early afternoon, we better hit up Utah now if we were going to make it this weekend. So off we headed to Utah, never having stopped in Vegas yet. Sure enough the NASCAR event had a jammed parking lot and we managed to miss all the arriving traffic. Just as we drove by the national anthem was being sung and we saw the fly over of the F-16s. We made it out to St George, UT picking up a few caches along the way and a fair number in St George itself. A pretty interesting city and a nice place to cache. At this point we realized we've found caches in 6 states in about 24 hours. As the evening crept up on us, it was time to head back to Vegas. We stopped for a few caches along the proper side of the road, in the dark now, on the way back. Our rental car had the 'NeverLost' GPS installed. I do find it is handy to have two GPS units for road trip caching. One to mark the route to the destination and one to use for locating the caches themselves, so having the extra GPS in the car was sometimes handy. On the other hand the implementation was a bit wonky. It wouldn't remember any previous settings, except sometimes the previous destination. Which means, every time we stopped, it reverted to full volume, full brightness and english. So every once and a while you'd get a nice shock as it blared 'RESUME!' when it remembered your previous destination. There also isn't a permanent off button either, in fact it never actually turns off, it will only turn off the screen and speaker. I wonder how this affects the car battery over time, although it always does have a GPS lock when fired up.

Finally it was time to find some caches in Las Vegas as we waited for the meet up time with our Couch Surfing host. We ended up visiting Fremont Street and the neon graveyard, along with some other caches in town and ended the night by driving down the strip. We met up with our CS host at her work site and after making arrangements went off to find so more caches while she ran some errands. At this point neither OHMIC or myself seemed all that interested in finding any more caches, which was pretty odd if you know us. The night was getting late and the list of errands our host had to run kept growing. Eventually we finally met up and had a nice conversation with our host in her condo and then we eagerly found our beds and slept for the night.

Fremont St

Early the next morning we were refreshed and ready for more caching with plans to meet our host later for breakfast. We started caching around the area we were staying and ran up a long string of DNFs (Did Not Find) on simple urban caches. Our patience strained, we decided to move along and hit up the virtual cache tour of the strip. A series of virtual caches starting at the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign and continuing along the strip with a cache at virtually every big hotel. We got to see the sights from the ground level and walk through a few of the hotels. I have to say I didn't really find it all that interesting. While the mega-expensive attractions are interesting to look at, they didn't really hold my interest long. The themes as well seemed lacking with a McDonalds-esque plastic quality. We walked through a lot of the Paris hotel and Jacques was quite intrigued by the bistros. The food looked great, but no-one was eating it, instead lined up at the buffet. The overall effect of the theming felt lacking to me, filled with tourists with no shred of culture or authenticity left. Not having heard about our breakfast meet up yet, we continued caching around the city, the urban caches and DNFs were really becoming irritating. We tried to seek out parks and green spaces but they are few and far between in the desert, one urban park was even locked on a weekend. By now our breakfast had become lunch and we were starting to run on empty, both physically and mentally. More urban caching wasn't sounding appetizing. We pushed through, found a few more caches and some green space in a wash (a large drainage ditch to clear water when it rains, otherwise filled with walkways and greenery). By now we finally got in touch with our host who had just finished eating, doh, so we said our goodbyes and headed off for some more caching and some food. We headed out to the Kyle Canyon valley and our spirits were restored. Finding a nice desert scene, large caches, nice hikes and fresh air. We found many caches along the way and stopped at an elevation of about 5000 where the snow first started to appear again. Evening darkness was setting in, so we packed up our caching and finally met up with MHz at Mimi's Cafe in Las Vegas for a nice dinner. After dinner we figured we needed to be back on the road towards Phoenix.

Welcome

New York, New York

Paris

Bellagio

Joshua Trees
- Kyle Canyon

Kyle Canyon

The usual story, a few caches along the way, not many places to turn off. We again stopped in Kingman, AZ for the night. It was a bit earlier than our normal stopping time so we toured around town a bit, found several caches and even started a cache series. One DNF plagued our night, even after two visits. After a good nights sleep we were refreshed and sure we knew where to look for that cache. But alas still not found. The cache was located next to a museum and it was now open so we wandered inside in search of help. In what seems like the usual, the front line staff weren't really informed of the geocache. The first guy gave us a blank stare and had no idea. A younger fellow wandered over and started giving us directions somewhere, not really understanding what we asked. When it finally sank in he disappeared to a back room and returned with another fellow. The guy oddly reminded me of grnbrg and after a short discussion we learned he was the fellow who hid the cache along with the remainder of the series in town. In short order we had a hint and some information on getting to some other caches in town. Back out we went and even with hint in hand it took several minutes to locate the well disguised cache. We rounded out the morning with several more finds in the series, each of which was located at a historic site in town and many provided additional information within the cache on the history. These were very good caches, hidden but fairly easy to find, each one a little different and they take you to someplace with a story. I enjoyed the '24 hour bail bonds' location with a closed sign near one cache. It was a good morning and we wrapped it up with a wonderful breakfast at the mom and pop shop called the Roadrunner Cafe. These are the restaurants you just have to love, great personal service, great food and great value. The little place was packed with a rotating set of customers and a healthy collection of regulars. We bid farewell to Kingman and continued on to Phoenix. The sun was shining and it was a great drive back down, stopping at a few caches and even finding a few roadside stops finally.

Spot the Cache
- Kingman, AZ

Arizona Desert

Back at the Mesa airport with little fanfare. We boarded the plane on the tarmac again, this time using the front door and the back steps of the MD82/83. I think this was an older one and the seats were a bit better, but still bad. The stewards weren't as funny either, but oh well, a simple cheap flight. Landing back in Grand Forks it was cold again. Decided it would be best to stop for a meal before leaving the city so we stopped at the Blue Moose. It's one of those restaurants we've tried to eat at several times but it's either closed or full. Very happy with the choice. They had an interesting bubble gum flavoured iced tea (although I think they called it raspberry), at first it was odd, but then it really grows on you. An uneventful drive back to Winnipeg capped off the weekend as Monday drew to a close. The trip nabbed me 4 new states, visits to Las Vegas and Phoenix areas and about 140 cache finds. Another great experience.

More Shopping Reviews

ertyu — 2010-01-11T21:03:36-05:00

I put in an order on the Sears website recently. Ordering was fairly smooth although there appears to be a stock check late in the process that mangles things and leaves weird and confusing product status messages. Their current sale page at the time was completely lacking in details, especially the duration of the sale. Banners for the sale appeared well after it was over. A complete order generates a confirmation number online and a note saying you'll get an emailed order notification. Well that email never came. I tried checking my order status online, even after logging into your account you can't access your order without an order number. That confirmation number I got does not contain the order number, nor can it be used to look up the order. Calling the 1-800 line though, with my name easily looked up the order. I got the order shipped for roughly free to a nearby depot for pickup. Apparently all packages have to be picked up within 6 days and just for fun, they don't bother shipping your order in the same package or at the same time.

I also recently put in another order with Amazon.com. I end up ordering from .com instead of .ca because I end up with a couple of gift certificates for .com every now and then. Everything there works pretty top notch. A few minor issues though. I find I have difficulty figuring out which products and/or which sellers can ship a product to Canada. I end up adding everything to my cart and then trying to check out to see if it can be shipped. Kudos to Amazon though, this has improved somewhat, many product pages now show directly on them "We are not able to ship this item to your default shipping address." Granted this doesn't apply to all the people selling via Amazon in the "More Buying Choices" section. BTW I still don't quite understand how that works. The next issue involves those other buying choices. If you add products from multiple sellers, it is difficult or impossible to figure out the break down of shipping charges.

My ZFS Server

ertyu — 2010-01-11T20:14:32-05:00

When I first discovered ZFS, I thought it was a very impressive technology and was eagerly anticipating it maturing and becoming mainstream. Some of the big improvements involve removing a lot of troubling barriers we've all experienced in the past. Partitioning, large files, large disks, errors, RAID, compression, sharing, backups, etc. all changed and made much easier to deal with. Some others that are more key for me, but more subtle include the end-to-end check summing, transparent duplication of blocks and variety of RAID schemes.

For a while now I've been looking to improve my backups of my personal computers at home. I juggled a few ideas but nothing until gelled until I discovered Intel's Atom processor was available cheaply with 64bit support and ZFS had matured and was readily available. The pieces then came together, I snagged an Atom 330 board, a Mini-ITX chassis capable of holding four full sized disks, plus a slim optical drive and a small sized (2.5") drive internally. I added in a Solid State Disk (SSD) for the OS disk that fit in the 2.5" slot and added two 1TB disks for the bulk storage. Back to the 64bit issue, while ZFS runs on 32bit hardware, it's really designed for 64bit and from the reports I've read, it runs faster and more stably on 64bit hardware. The other crucial piece was the operating system.

I had been looking at a few options for operating systems, OpenSolaris, Solaris, Nexenta and FreeBSD all support ZFS. Nexenta looked pretty good, it was a prepacked file serving appliance, but the community was small and the project seemed a bit odd, combining the OpenSolaris kernel with GNU userland. FreeBSD was my first choice, but by version 7.x the ZFS support was tagged experimental and the potential issues looked scary. I've used Solaris quite a bit in the past, but I asked around and OpenSolaris seemed like the better choice.

I installed OpenSolaris and was some what impressed at first, but that quickly wore off. The first issue, a bug that prevented the kernel from detecting my CPU as 64bit capable and no way to force a 64bit kernel to boot. Next the driver for the ethernet card was malfunctioning. I tried many things to fix both but made little to no head way. So I gave Solaris a try, remembering how rock solid it was. Well, Solaris is still very unimpressive on x86 hardware, I had forgotten. The installer is weak compared to OpenSolaris and left a lot to be desired. The issues stacked up faster on Solaris than I could log them and I quickly gave up with nothing really working. I think I pretty much gave up at this point especially with a new release of OpenSolaris due shortly. The new release (2009.06) came and voila, it fixed all the previous issues. Here's where ZFS shone for a bit. When I initially installed OpenSolaris on this box I had setup a ZFS mirrored pool on my two 1TB disks. Through the subsequent two installations I had done nothing with those disks, but kept them online. With a quick ZFS command, the file systems on the disks including the mirror was instantly recovered and back online and perfectly intact. While this install of OpenSolaris was working pretty well, it was a struggle at every point to get stuff working. Some of it I got to work, others I didn't and some OS stuff had bugs that just prevented things from working normally. After months of working to get it up to snuff, it was on the back burner again. This time awaiting a new release of FreeBSD.

FreeBSD 8.0 was released with stable ZFS support and I jumped ship. Although I first had to determine if it supported the TRIM command for SSD, (It doesn't yet, looks like a 9.x feature) so I could pick the right firmware for my SSD. It supports either a garbage collection clean up method or TRIM, but not both at the same time. Whoops, I skipped a step, I wanted to keep all that data I've loaded onto the machine already. ZFS to the rescue? Nope. Here's one downside that is often overlooked. ZFS pools and file systems can be upgraded, but never downgraded. OpenSolaris runs a slightly newer ZFS stack than FreeBSD, meaning FreeBSD wouldn't be able to read the ZFS on my disks. Nor could I use features like a ZFS export as it is also version dependent. So I plugged in an external disk and copied away the old fashioned way. Here's where I discovered how slow and CPU intensive USB is. But now back to FreeBSD. The install went very smoothly. Adding the extra software and functions I wanted also went smooth and quick. There were two things where OpenSolaris out shone FreeBSD. First, FreeBSD hasn't integrated iSCSI target or SMB sharing into ZFS yet, but there are two ports that do iSCSI and I used istgt and samba for SMB which work just fine but have to be configured separately. Second, one of OpenSolaris's big features is TimeSlider which maintains an ongoing periodic backup. There is no analog in FreeBSD so I just used a script to replicate what TimeSlider does, periodic ZFS snapshots. Since this is really what I wanted anyway, point in time backup of the file system. So, in less than two days I got my FreeBSD install all configured and up and running, including everything I wanted from backups of my computers to storing my mp3 files and distributing videos, photos and music to my TiVo.

Automation Failure

ertyu — 2010-01-11T20:05:21-05:00

In the past couple weeks I've had two phone calls from different automated services. I didn't end up answering either one and let my voicemail take the calls. Neither of these services appears to be able to deal with voicemail. It appears like they started playing the automated message as soon as my voicemail picked up, leaving me with a fragment of a message in both cases. These messages were undecipherable on their own. With some outside context and correlating messages I've never had before with unusual events I'm undertaking I was able to guess as to what the message may have meant and who it was from, but I still didn't actually get the jist of whatever they were trying to tell me. I don't think I've missed out on anything, but it certainly would be easy to. Yet more examples of the great customer service we get these days.

Sidewalk Issues

ertyu — 2009-11-18T15:11:17-05:00

I've noticed a common issue with a lot of sidewalks recently from both a pedestrian and drivers point of view. The sidewalk cross walk across a right exit lane is often placed too deep into the corner. With this positioning it often becomes impossible for pedestrians to see cars and cars to see pedestrians until they are very close, with the view being obscured by materials inside the corner. It's a pretty dangerous setup especially with higher speed roadways. I see some reasons why they are built like this, it puts people into the middle of the pedestrian island and allows some cars to queue up in the exit lane without blocking through traffic. In my opinion, visibility and safety far outweigh these factors and it would be nice to have them changed with the cross walk brought towards the oncoming traffic. A similar issue exists for pretty much any business with a drive through, double blind pedestrian crossings.

I'm one of those guys...

ertyu — 2009-11-12T16:43:11-05:00

I took the plunge and got winter tires for my car. A couple factors I used to make the decision: Based on the difference between the old worn out Michelin tires on my Accord and the new Continental tires on my Passat that I ended up driving at the same time last winter, I noticed a huge difference in tire performance. Any improvement in tire performance would be very welcome in difficult winter conditions. From the financial standpoint, if you plan to own the car for several years, enough to go through an even number of sets of tires, you've effectively just bought two sets of tires up front that will last twice as long.

At first I figured I would just get tires that fit on my regular rims and swap each year. There were however several reason why steel rims were a better idea. First, a smaller diameter wheel lets you pick a higher profile tire. The smaller width means it can get through snow better, although it might be a bit worse on ice, its a little better at handling pot holes and other bumps. The smaller diameter, higher profile tires are cheaper also. Mounting an entire wheel is cheaper than mounting a tire. Tires aren't designed to be mounted over and over again. So I snagged a used set of 16" steel wheels from a Jetta with the same bolt pattern for a really good price and found that 1010Tires in Vancouver had a much better price than any place local or online when comparing all costs.

So now I'm one of those guys driving around with ugly steel wheels and winter tires even though a nice looking wheel cover set is only $30, it doesn't seem worth it as the covers are just too easy to damage in winter.

Nickle and Dimed

ertyu — 2009-10-06T14:41:09-05:00

There is an annoying trend at some businesses, restaurants mainly it seems, to charge a small fee to pay by Interac or credit card. This nickle and dime fee is seriously annoying, enough to drive me away from a business. I'd much rather see this fee added to all products in a fashion that would generate the equivalent revenue (perhaps cost recovery) for the business. I'm really not going to notice an additional few cents built into the price of a product, but I'm going to get really peaved if you ask for these cents after ringing up the bill.